Akzo Nobel Offers Tool To Predict Impact of Fouling on Hull Coatings

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October 17, 2015

AkzoNobel’s Marine Coatings brand International has announced the launch of Intertrac Vision, claimed to be the shipping industry’s first consultancy tool that provides accurate and transparent predictions on the fuel and CO2 savings potential of fouling control coatings, prior to application. The company said that the science that underpins Intertrac Vision has taken over four years to develop. The work has been led by its own scientists who have also collaborated with leading academic and commercial research institutes, including the University College London Energy Institute, MARIN, Newcastle University and more than 30 shipowners and operators worldwide.

The premise is that Intertrac Vision combines an understanding of total hull roughness (micro and macro) and ‘roughness’ associated with biofouling and uses studies carried out by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) on different hull forms in order to make accurate predictions on the impact of fouling control coatings on the comparative powering requirements of a vessel.

Collectively, according to Akzo Nobel, Intertrac Vision comprises hundreds of thousands of datasets, making it the shipping industry’s first Big Data solution to accurately predict the performance of a coating technology prior to application.